Morning Bits

Lawmakers dump controversial online piracy bills. “Congressional support for controversial online piracy legislation eroded dramatically on Wednesday in the face of an unprecedented online protest supported by tech titans such as Google, Wikipedia and Facebook. Several key senators withdrew their support from the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA), including Tea Party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), an elected member of his party’s leadership. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who leads the Senate GOP’s campaign team, said the legislation should be put on hold, while Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a sponsor and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, retreated from the bill. Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) also withdrew his sponsorship.” Isn’t democracy grand?

Newt Gingrich should dump the whining act. Does he think the Obama team will be any easier? “Newt Gingrich: Romney camp is ‘dirty and dishonest.’” Speaking of dirty and dishonest, the “King of Bain” ad is still running, right?

Unless CAP dumps the offending bloggers the controversy will not end. “Last December, a top anti-Semitism watchdog group accused the Center for American Progress, a prominent Washington think tank, of peddling anti-Israel and borderline anti-Semitic material on its Web site and Twitter feeds. Six days later, President Obama met for coffee with the man who oversaw the offending content — Faiz Shakir, the site’s editor-in-chief. That the president met with Shakir amid the ballooning scandal illustrates just how close the administration is with CAP. Now that association may come back to haunt the White House, as three leading Jewish groups — the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center — have accused CAP and its staff of publishing ‘anti-Israel,’ ‘hateful’ and ‘toxic anti-Jewish’ material.”

John Bolton argues it is time to dump our Iran sanctions policy. “Sanctions have long been touted as the answer, but they are not. Iran has enough friends (Russia and China, plus Cuba, Venezuela and others on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Latin jaunt) to withstand them. North Korea, the world’s most heavily sanctioned country, with a population perennially near starvation, has exploded two nuclear devices. Nonetheless, both the Obama and Bush administrations sought negotiations with Pyongyang’s criminal regime, an unfortunate tutorial for Tehran’s mullahs. Nor have assassinations, sabotage or the Stuxnet computer virus materially damaged Iran’s program. While politicians claim these measures show they are ‘doing something’ about Iran, objectively they simply enable its steady, clandestine progress. They are diversions masquerading as solutions.”

Jim Pethokoukis says conservatives should dump the argument that Romney’s effective tax rate is too high. “It’s real simple: If you think the biggest problem facing the United States today is income inequality, then you should be outraged that Mitt Romney’s income tax rate isn’t higher. But if you instead think America’s biggest problem is high unemployment and a lack of economic growth, then you should be outraged that Romney is paying any income taxes at all. Really.”

It would be nice if MSNBC dumped the pretense that it’s anything more than that. “Former president Bill Clinton has turned media critic - dubbing MSNBC ‘our version of Fox.’ ”

If Romney did a document dump now, he could make this argument about his 15 percent tax rate. “According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total average federal tax rate for the middle quintile of Americans is 14.3%. This includes all federal taxes, including Social Security and death taxes, not just income taxes. If we look at just income taxes, the middle quintile of Americans pay just 3.3%. The bottom two quintiles pay even less in taxes. The total average federal rate for the lowest quintile is 4% and the rate for the second quintile 10.6%.”